Jeff Lacker is ready to trade the rough and tumble of monetary policymaking for the angst of financial services reform.
"I do intend to focus on bank regulatory and financial issues," the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond says in an interview in his office, high above the James River. "It really is the question of our time."
That Lacker's answers differ from those held by a majority of his Federal Reserve colleagues will surprise few. He's solidified a reputation for independence by opposing the Fed's initial rate cuts back in 2007 and casting the lone "no" vote at each of the FOMC's eight meetings last year.
Lacker, 57, isn't afraid to speak his mind. In fact, he views it as his duty. And on banking policy, he's convinced the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 handed way too much power to federal regulators.
"I worry about people taking away from the crisis the lesson that what's key is to respond with maximal force and to provide regulators with maximal discretion across the widest possible terrain," Lacker says. "Enhancing the scope for intervention and enhancing the tools just spreads the poison that boxes us in, in a crisis."
That neatly sums up the divide among policymakers that has emerged since the 2008 crisis. One camp — the one that's firmly in charge — believes the path to financial stability is paved with rules, oversight and enforcement while the other is desperately searching for ways to rebuild market discipline.
These policymakers, including FDIC Vice Chairman Tom Hoenig and Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, are trying to shift the debate to focus on shrinking financial giants or limiting access to the federal safety net.
But Lacker, who joined the Richmond Fed in 1989 and became its president in 2004, takes another angle. He wants the government to reverse years, even decades, of rescuing any large financial company that gets into trouble. He wants to tie the government's hands so regulators have no funds to finance these bailouts. Only then, he argues, will market participants believe bailouts are over and begin to discipline financial companies themselves.
"The linchpin seems to be the credibility about what we say about who we will rescue," Lacker explains. "We deliberately fuzzed that up in the '80s and '90s with constructive ambiguity. We wanted to maintain the fiction that we would not intervene, but at the same time we tried to preserve the flexibility, the discretion to intervene.
"Well, markets see through that."
Lacker also laments that too many policymakers view any volatility in financial markets as too much.
"There is this acute incentive to avoid being blamed for turmoil that is perceived as avoidable," Lacker says of government officials. "This is the other danger going forward. One thing I fear is just that the preoccupation with financial stability has become an indiscriminate urge to limit volatility."
The best way to convince markets that the era of bailouts has ended is to let a big financial company fail, he says.
"Credibility is going to require us to take actions that will be painful to some, painful to financial markets," including "guiding a large financial institution through the bankruptcy process, unaided with government taxpayer funds."
Asked if the government could simply stand by when markets freeze up, Lacker questions the question.
